Paris Paloma: Beyond Female Rage

Paris Paloma: It was inspiring in some ways and quite lonely in others. My mom likes to say I had a very Cider with Rosie childhood. Cider with Rosie is a classic book about a boy in the countryside. I enjoyed it very much. I remember growing up at my grandma’s cottage, and she had a beautiful garden. I spent so much time outside, and I think that really shaped my personality.

My mom would always take me to art galleries, so that was a big part of my childhood, even though I didn’t really understand things yet. I have memories of seeing artworks that I wouldn’t be able to name.

As for music, she was always playing Motown around the house, or Eva Cassidy, and songs by Burt Bacharach. That was really my introduction to music. But I didn’t discover folk music and songwriting, and then evolve that into the kind of music I make today, until much later.

Yes, always. I started writing music when I was around 13, and I kept it quite private at first. It really wasn’t something I went public with until I was 20.

I maybe performed songs I’d written twice during those years, but until I was 20, I’d never put them anywhere.

I sometimes would, and then I would just forget them and lose them. I’m sure they’re somewhere in the general archive of all my drawings and writings.

I would start novels all the time because, in my teens, I wanted to be a creative writer. So I would get new notebooks and write books and things. Eventually, those stories turned into songs.

I think that started becoming an aspect of it in my teens with my art, the stories, and the songs I would write. It came from things that happened to me. I came into contact with patriarchy, gender violence, and sexual violence, and that shaped my worldview, as it does for so many young women.

That’s why I don’t call the music I make now political, because by that logic, everything is political. I just write about my experience. But because I’m a woman, my experience is shaped by patriarchy, as is everyone’s, which is a great tragedy.

So it evolved because certain things happened that shaped the life I wrote about.

I didn’t really feel my gender when I was a very young child. It was through the media, TV, films, and things like that that the portrayal of women really confused me.

I think every young girl has that moment where she’s like, “Well, I’m not like other girls,” because she’s finding out that girls are supposed to like certain specific things, that girls are vapid, not intelligent, not curious, not wild. And you’re all of those things, so you think, “Wow, I must not be like other girls.”

I think it came at a really important time culturally, in the conversation that was happening among groups of women. It became this lightning rod for that cultural conversation.

I’m really grateful that’s how it happened. I very much feel like I was part of something, as opposed to the leader of any kind of moment or movement around it. I wrote that song because I felt that collective exhaustion women were feeling.

Part of it is about my own experience, and part of it is about my grief for the tragedy that so many women relate to and that resonates with them.

I understand why. It’s a relatively new term that people have been using because I think women are so relieved to be able to express their anger.

I take it a bit further, though, and I don’t really identify with that phrase because everyone feels rage. The downtrodden especially, because they’re being exploited, abused, and dominated.

To call it female rage and treat it like some kind of divine, godly thing that’s innate to womanhood ignores the fact that women shouldn’t have to be angry.

I feel so much grief knowing that we didn’t have to live like this. We don’t have to live in a patriarchy. I think female rage presents anger and womanhood as synonymous, and I fundamentally don’t believe that’s the case.

That said, there’s something very spine-tingling about the moment a woman finally opens her eyes, opens her mouth, puts her foot down, and expresses rage when she hasn’t been able to before.

That’s my stance on it. I understand where people find power in the term, but I think we need to look beyond it so we don’t become desensitized to women’s anger because we start to think it’s simply a given.

I honestly don’t remember the first time because it was such a whirlwind as soon as the song was released.

It felt like a gift because I had felt so powerless and voiceless myself. To finally have this song open the floodgates and bring so many women together made me feel like I’d found a community.

Honestly, it all happened at once, so I don’t remember one specific moment.

Yeah, but the negative backlash has always been more validating than anything else because it proves something.

It comes from men whose criticism isn’t constructive or kind; it’s misogynistic. Any backlash to a song like Labour, which has brought so many women and girls together, proves the necessity of that song.

Some men have been amazing allies, wonderful fans, and come to my shows and have a great time. But there are also men who shout louder than those men, and they feel immensely threatened by the topic of women’s empowerment.

That only proves that the song needs to exist.

Yeah. I wrote Good Boy because I was experiencing first-hand the effects of things like the manosphere and figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Andrew Tate.

There are so many boys and men who devote themselves to those figures, both in real life and online. They leave hateful comments on women’s posts and share hate speech about women and people in their communities.

We’re in a male loneliness epidemic, and these men are behaving horribly. But there’s something fundamentally sick about that absence of love and empathy.

They’re never going to be rewarded by the people whose ideals they uphold, yet they’re so quick to defend them, especially when others are trying to make good happen in the world.

I wanted to write a song that says: your life would be so much better, and you’d be so much happier, if you didn’t hate women so much and if you realized how obedient you’re being to patriarchy.

Yeah, I guess so.

I would get comments on videos about Labour saying things like, “No one ever talks about the fact that men have to go to war,” or “Men’s mental health is really bad,” or “Men can’t talk about their feelings.”

And I would say: you’ve just listed things that are the result of patriarchy. We have a common enemy, and instead you’re trying to silence me, when all of those things are products of patriarchy.

I wrote Good Boy to point out that men who aren’t millionaires or billionaires but are sitting on their phones commenting against women’s empowerment actually have far more in common with those women than they do with the manosphere role models they look up to.

That was really the starting point of why I wrote that song.

I’m so creatively fulfilled by this album, and I’m so excited. It feels like it’s been a long time coming.

It’s very much about love and art and about the deeply personal aspects of being an artist.

The album treats love almost like an anthology. Some songs are about the ways I’ve loved dysfunctionally. Some are about toxic love, some about healthy love, some are platonic, and some are romantic.

It’s a very vulnerable dissection of loving.

It’s also a very tightly connected concept album. There are themes introduced in some songs that reappear in others.

One of those themes is examining masculinity as a woman who loves men. Several songs explore that. Others explore my own dysfunction, my trauma, how that affects the way I love, and the things I used to think were love compared to what I believe love is now.

All of that affects the art I make. So the theme of art and being an artist is woven throughout the album.

There’s a lot of trust involved because some of the songs on this album are deeply personal.

On the first album, I very heavily covered personal things with metaphor, myth, and similar devices. I still do that to a degree, but there’s a lot more transparency when it comes to the vulnerable parts of my life on this album.

So there’s a huge degree of trust involved when you release something like that. You have to trust that your fans won’t use it as an excuse to become intrusive about your life or try to find out more without your consent.

Luckily, I have a really empathetic and sensitive fan base. I feel like the songs that have already been released, as well as the ones that will come out with the album, have been and will be honoured by them in that way.

I’ve seen how wonderfully they’ve come together as a community. There are moments of pure magic when I’m on tour and playing shows with them.

The fairy dancing they do, which has now become a tradition, started completely spontaneously after every show.

With this album, I’m really just looking to grow that community even more and present them with songs that allow them to feel the full spectrum of their messy emotions.

There’s a lot of tenderness on this album, which I think is something new.

I think a lot of people know me for songs that contain a lot of anger, and there’s still plenty of that here. But my anger comes from a place of fiercely wanting to defend the things I love so much.

This album speaks to those things that I love so deeply.

I hope the fairies use these songs to continue building and strengthening their wonderful community.